Two years ago, the Hooksett school board proposed a warrant article that covered all the repairs and replacements necessary at all three Hooksett schools. It was defeated. Last year, the school board submitted an article that covered just Hooksett Memorial School, arguably the building with the most need. It too was defeated. Now, armed with fresh insight from newly retained design/build partners, the school board’s facilities subcommittee is turning to the public for help drafting a warrant article that voters will be more likely to approve next March.
The facilities subcommittee held a pair of meetings last month in conjunction with its newly hired design/build partners, architectural firm The Turner Group and Bedford-based general contractor Harvey Construction. Representatives from both firms, the facilities subcommittee, and the school district were on hand to answer questions from the handful of Hooksett citizens in attendance.
Memorial’s Leaky Roof
While there are issues to fix and equipment to replace at all three schools, the biggest and most immediate need continues to be the Hooksett Memorial School roof. At 23 years old, the roof membrane is past its useful life. Rooftop drain strainers are blocked, creating “ponds” of water that linger on the rooftop for weeks. This has enabled weeds and other vegetation to grow. More importantly, the roof leaks in heavy rainfall, particularly in the cafeteria.
Hooksett School District maintenance director Dean Farmer confirmed that the cafeteria is safe for food preparation and consumption. Rainwater leaks into the seating area of the cafeteria, not into the kitchen where food is prepared. The real inconvenience is “having to move students around when these issues come up,” said Farmer. “In the cafe, we had to move tables around, so [students] weren’t directly below the [leaky] unit. We’ve had to move students out of classrooms and into others, [and] this is very disruptive to a student’s learning environment.”
Jillian Godbout, vice chair of the Hooksett School Board and chair of the facilities subcommittee, was asked about the estimated cost of replacing just the roof membrane. She admitted that the subcommittee was not talking numbers yet, but it would likely cost “a couple of million.”
The Turner Group and Harvey Construction recommend the replacement of both the Hooksett Memorial roof membrane and its eight rooftop units. A rooftop unit or RTU is a self-contained heating, ventilation, and air conditioning unit typically installed on the roof of commercial buildings. Memorial’s HVAC system includes eight rooftop units and seven energy recovery ventilators or ERVs. The ERVs probably have another five years of service life left, but the rooftop units are “in really bad shape,” said Farmer.
He uses a software system to communicate with the rooftop units at each school. Through the software interface, he can tell each unit to shut down, turn on, change temperature, etc. But at Hooksett Memorial School, that communication is no longer seamless or instantaneous. In fact, it can take several hours for the unit to respond.
“We’ve had issues where a damper on a rooftop unit will open up,” he explained. “It’s twenty degrees outside, and it just brings in twenty-degree air. I tell it to close, and it listens two hours later. In that time, the cold air has gotten down into the building, and it has frozen the heating units, and those pipes blow up.”
This is precisely what happened a few years ago when the entire fifth grade wing had to be evacuated -- all seven classrooms. The heating unit froze, and the pipes broke open. The damage cost roughly $5,000 to repair.
The Turner Group’s district-wide assessment noted other important but less immediate action items. The roof membrane at Cawley Middle School will need to be replaced in five years’ time. The rooftop units and energy recovery ventilators at Underhill and Cawley are also reaching the end of their usable lifespans. And the boilers at all three schools have five to ten years of service life left, but system components will require regular maintenance.
The boilers, in particular, could prove to be a timing challenge. As Farmer noted, he can’t just walk into Home Depot to buy new boilers.
“A lot of our stuff is special-order, made-to-order, months to get,” he explained. “If a boiler goes down in the middle of winter, you’re in trouble. You are potentially closing school down. Last year, Memorial lost heat twice. Luckily, it was vacation week so we were able to squeak through.”
Safe and Functional
The facilities subcommittee comprises community members, school board members, and district administrators who have done a great deal of work since the last warrant article was defeated at the polls. Its previous proposal focused only on energy performance, and many found it lacking.
Subcommittee member Gary Gagnon is a 40-year Hooksett resident who recently retired as the senior vice president of operations and infrastructure at a large company. More than anyone, he understands the necessity of maintaining buildings and systems, and he felt the previous proposal was inadequate.
“The initial proposal the school board pulled together was not going to properly address the issues that had developed within the schools over the past years,” he said. “In my opinion, it was not the best use of taxpayer money. The latest proposal, although not perfect, is a better representation of the repairs required at the schools and a better start toward looking at maintenance projects down the road.”
Like Gagnon, Hooksett resident and facilities subcommittee member Dave Hutchinson also wanted to see a shift in focus to “more traditional construction management rather than energy savings, which isn’t our particular focus right now,” he said. “Our particular focus is making the schools functional.”
He noted that these information sessions are all about trying to determine what the community is willing to support on a bond article, and he is realistic about the outcome.
“Whatever the bond value is does not solve all the problems,” he said. “It just kicks some of the problems down the line, but at least we’ve got it to safe and functional.”
The timeline is tricky. Even if voters approve construction of a new roof for Hooksett Memorial School, for example, that work won’t happen immediately, explained Keith Kelley, vice president and director of preconstruction at Harvey Construction. “Approval in March does not mean construction in May. Approval in March means construction next March. So now we are talking about a five-year plan that is already two years old.”
Discussion of the timeline in which repairs need to occur led, naturally, to the elephant-in-the-room question: What if Hooksett, once again, does nothing? What if next year’s warrant article also is defeated?
Kelley likened Hooksett’s situation to buying a new car. “You don’t want to buy a new car when you have to buy a new car,” he said, “because you lose all your leverage to negotiate that deal. You are going to put yourself in that situation by not taking care of things today.”
Farmer echoed those remarks. “Being reactionary to things is never the situation you want to be in,” he added, “especially when you have children and staff in the building.”
It is critical to start the process soon, they said, because in five years’ time, the roof at Cawley Middle School will need to be replaced. Ideally, the facilities subcommittee would like to stagger the projects across a five-to-ten-year span to alleviate strain on the taxpayers. Its members understand that no one wants to see their taxes increase.
“NH is known to have a very high property tax and that will continue as long as the state refuses to adequately fund the schools and find alternative ways to provide that funding,” noted Gagnon. “In the meantime, we should not let our buildings fall into disrepair, which is what has happened at the schools.”
“You are not the only [town] in this situation,” added Kelley. “A lot of communities are going through this across the state.”
Harvey Construction works almost exclusively in New Hampshire and has extensive experience spearheading big education projects, including the construction of Sanborn Regional High School and Windham High School. Among its clients with projects in development or under construction are the school districts of Concord, Nashua, Rochester, and Laconia.
The subcommittee plans to use the feedback they received during the two October information sessions to help shape the warrant article that will appear on next year’s ballot. The Turner Group and Harvey Construction will then draft a final report that will be made public and widely available.
“It will be everywhere,” confirmed Godbout. “Every bit of information we have, we’ll make public. We want to be upfront and honest about this process and what it’s going to cost to the taxpayers . . . We are trying to be fiscally responsible with this project because we know what the community is going through,” she added. “But we need to take care of our schools.”
